


Blinding Cold

by hellkitty



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Community: hc_bingo, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-27
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-23 13:38:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6118123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompts were suicide, crucifixion and poisoning and a wild card (blindness).  Consider these as content warnings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blinding Cold

It had been a trap.  Gabe Jones remembered realizing that--too late, of course--the enemy fire was somehow crossfiring safely overhead, driving them into the farmhouse. He’d kept going, because even a few years of soldiering had trained his feet to keep moving no matter what his brain was doing.  And by then, it was definitely too late: the floor sagged, then splintered, under all their feet.  He had just enough time to yell, “HOLD!” before the wood planks of the floor gave way entirely, plunging him and Barnes into some sort of swallowing darkness. 

And then he was here...wherever here was, and either he was blindfolded, or his eyes were on strike. His nose was working, at least, and it gave him the scent of antiseptics and a sharp ozone smell of electricity. His ears fed him a sort of soft, rhythmic pssssh. 

It was cold, here, too. Not brutal cold, not like he’d felt in the Ardennes, that cold so fierce it turned your hands into numb-yet-burning claws around the metal of your rifle, your own breath freezing the stubble of your beard like white leprosy.  But it was cold enough that he could feel bands of it, the way you feel cold air against your bare skin, across his arms, and a little flicker of cold along his upper arms, like cool air creeping into the slackness of his t-shirt sleeves. 

No pain, though. Which was weird. How do you fall any distance and not even have that echoing leftover of the impact shocking through your body?  Another thing Gabe was going to chalk up to what his Auntie would have called, “just ain’t right.”  

A lot of ‘just ain’t right’ here. And now he had a bunch of data, but no answers.  

Time to get some, though he figured the odds were 50/50 he wouldn’t like the answers. Nah, make that 80/20.  

“Barnes.” The voice came out a rawer hiss than he’d intended, and he had to stifle an uneasy cough, before trying again. “Barnes. You there?”

A moan, to his right.  Barnes’ voice.  When you bivouacked together, soldiers crowded in thin walled Quonset huts or oiled canvas tents or even less, you learned the sound of a man as well as you learned the funk of his unwashed socks.  

“Hey, stay with me, man.”  Right, Gabe, new data.  New info.  Barnes was here. Sounded worse off than Gabe felt.  Both here, both alive. 

“Yeah.” Barnes’s voice, rallying a bit, croaky and harsh like he hadn’t spoken in a long time.  “Righ’ here.”  

“You remember anything between the floor and here?” Because that was a serious gap in Gabe’s memory, and if there was a way out, there might be a clue to it in that blank space.  “Like, how long I’ve been out?”

A restless sound, boot scuffing or something. “In and out f’r a coupla days.”  Barnes sounded pretty out of it himself.  

“Days?” Days.  Gabe didn’t like the sound of that. Being out for a couple of hours was one thing. Days, though?  

“Prob’ly better for you,” Barnes added. “They….” The words trailed off, and for a second Gabe thought something was happening, or that Barnes had passed out or something. Then Barnes continued, voice careful like picking his way through a minefield. “They did stuff.”

‘They’ and ‘stuff’--two of Gabe’s newest least favorite words. “Who’s they?”

A sort of whuffle. “Them. Nazi doctors.”  

Suddenly, Gabe didn’t want to know the ‘stuff’ part.  Nazi doctors. They'd run into them before. And he'd heard stories, other stories, of other things. Time for a change of subject. “They ever turn on the lights in here?” Because he’d been in some sock-dark places in this war, and he didn’t ever remember seeing nothing, not even a trace of movement. 

“On right...now.” It was like the sudden crash of realization and despair washed over both of them at the same time. 

“My eyes,” Gabe tried, and failed, to keep panic from his voice. “What’d they do to my eyes?”  

“Trying to turn ‘em blue,” Barnes said, after a long moment. As if he’d been trying to find a way to say it nicely, gently, and then giving up.  

Blue.  Gabe tried to picture himself with blue eyes, ice blue eyes staring out of his dark face, so different from his brown ones. Not just his, but his momma’s eyes, his grampa’s eyes through her.  

Didn’t matter, dummy, he thought. You’re blind. Blue eyes but at least you never have to see them.  

Small consolation.  No consolation. What would happen, even if they got out of here? He’d be a cripple, sent home from the war. He’d be helpless, dependent, needing his momma to dress him, cook for him, lead him around. And she’d have to look in those ruined eyes, even if he didn’t have to.  

He sagged back against the restraints, feeling a darkness darker than ever swallow him, like he was falling back into black water, or thick, sucking mud.  The cold seemed to spread through his skin, getting deeper, and he welcomed it, waiting for the cold to reach his heart. What was the point?  He heard a sound, soft and pathetic, and it took Gabe a second to realize the sound was a sob, rising out of his own throat. 

“Hey,” Barnes’s voice, softer. “Hang in there, Gabe. We’ll get out of it. We always do.”

“Till we don’t!” Gabe said, letting the despair flare into anger. Barnes would know it wasn’t directed at him. Not really. It was easier, safer, to be angry, even if the heat of it pushed the ice back from his veins. 

“Yeah, well, this ain’t the time we don’t,” Barnes said, his own voice heating. “They know we’re gone, Gabe. They’re going to come looking for us. We just gotta hang in there.”  

“Days, you said,” Gabe countered.  Maybe they won’t be found.  Especially if they knew the rest of the Commandos would be looking for them.  

“Hang in there,” Barnes repeated. 

“Maybe I don’t wanna be rescued.” It got old. They’d been through this before.  And it was bad enough before, when he’d been himself at the end of it, hale and ready to fight.  “Not like this.” 

“They can fix it. There’s a way. The SSR can make it right.” Faith Gabe knew Bucky didn’t really feel. It was more hope than belief. And he didn't need someone sugar coating hope for him. 

“Easy for you to say,” Gabe said, but the bitterness in his voice wasn’t active--more like the dregs of plonk, settled down to the bottom of the bottle. 

Another long silence, broken by some schussing shifting, a thin wheeze of air. “You haven’t seen what they’ve done to me.” The words were barely a whisper, reluctant to admit, even to himself.  The words were like a hook, dragging Gabe to the realization that he’d been thinking of himself, only himself, in all this. 

“Bad?” Gabe asked, knowing the answer must be yes, but not knowing what else to say, how else to reach out across the gap that he felt open between them. 

“Pretty bad,” Barnes admitted. "Made the mistake of praying where they could hear me."

Gabe didn't want to know, but he could guess. Nazis and their humor. It’s why Bucky wanted to believe--needed to believe--in a rescue, in the SSR.  In anything other than this continuing without end, without hope.  

“Yeah,” Gabe said, “Okay.”  I hear you. I understand.  It was all the comfort he could offer, pitiful as it was.  But he felt the ice start to recede from his heart, scraping and raw like a glacier retreating. Barnes needed him to be here. Barnes needed hope. And if not from Gabe, from where? “Just, when they come and I get off this damn table, you tell me which direction to punch.”  

And then he’d worry about the rest of it.    


**Author's Note:**

> Apparently there really were experiments to turn brown eyes blue--often performed on twin children in the concentration camps. To my knowledge, they never worked.


End file.
